First, our assumptions that general skills will be valuable has to be questioned. It seems clear to me that in a joined-up world where potentially 5 billion people have access to the worldwide Cloud, the age of the generalist is over. Instead, my prediction for the future is that you will need what I call ‘serial mastery’ to add real value. That has got crucial implications for understanding what will be valuable skills and competencies in the future, for developing deep mastery in these areas, and yet being able to move into other areas of mastery through sliding and morphing. It also has implications for an increasingly invisible world, where self-marketing and creating credentials will be key.
Second, our assumptions about the role of individualism and competitiveness as a foundation for creating great working lives and careers have to be questioned. In a world that could become increasingly fragmented and isolated, I believe that connectivity, collaboration and networks will be central. These networks could be the group that support you in complex tasks; it could be the crowd of diverse people who are able to be the basis of ideas and inspiration; it could even be the intimate, warm and loving relationships that will be at the heart of your capacity to regenerate and remain balanced. What is crucial here is that – in a world that becomes more and more virtual – strong, diverse, emotional relationships cannot be taken for granted, they have to be shaped and crafted.
Finally, as I consider the five forces that will shape our working lives over the coming two decades, and see how the storylines could play out, I am struck by the need to think hard about the type of working life to which we aspire. Do we follow the old assumptions of continuously going head first for consumption and quantity? Or is it now time to think hard about trade-offs and to focus more on the production and quality of our experiences and the balance of our lives, rather than simply the voraciousness of our consumption?
It is possible for each one of us to construct a very clear view of the challenges we face, and many of the trade-offs we will have to consider. Of course, our own future, and indeed the future of those we care about, is essentially unknowable. But that does not mean that we leave it to chance. I am convinced that we can prepare for the future in a way that increases the possibilities of success. We can do this by really understanding the five forces that will change our world. We can prepare by constructing storylines of possible futures that we can use as a basis for making choices and understanding consequences. Finally, we can prepare for the future by acknowledging that some of our most dearly held assumptions are misplaced and that we will be required to make some fundamental shifts in how we think and act our way into our future working lives. By doing this we are ensuring we are better equipped to construct a working life that excites us, brings us pleasure and creates worth for others and ourselves.
PART I
The Forces That Will Shape
Your Future
Chapter 1
The Five Forces
If you want to understand the future, you need to start with the five forces that will shape your world over the coming decades. What’s more, you need to understand these five forces in some detail, since it is often in the details that the really interesting stuff can be found. For me it has been an incredibly exciting journey to collect from around the world the 32 pieces about the forces. I cannot remember being so excited about getting up in the morning and researching and writing. I have been fascinated, surprised and intrigued by what I have found. I had no idea that in 2010 China was building 45 airports; or that the centre of innovation of handheld money devices is Kenya; or that by 2025 more than 5 billion people will be connected with each other through handheld devices. These are the hard facts that I will share with you in order to create a deeper and more accurate view of the way your working life will change. They are also the hard facts that will aid you as you begin to decide how you will construct your future working life, and indeed the advice you will give to others. In finding and putting these 32 pieces together, I have been influenced by the need to be global rather than local; historical rather than simply of the moment; and broad rather than narrow.
Taking a global focus
One of the challenges about understanding the future is that much of the contemporary research and books about technology, oil or globalisation tends to take a single-region focus – typically either the USA or Europe. This makes sense as the boundaries are well understood and so the context is agreed up front.
However, this local focus does not suit my purpose for this book. In the past, I have been delighted that people across the world have read my books, and my hope is that this book will resonate with people across the world. So it’s really important to me that wherever you are reading this book you have some sense of inclusion. But it is not just you as a reader that creates the need for a global viewpoint. Perhaps more than at any time in the history of mankind, the story of the future is a ‘joined-up’ story that can only be told from a global perspective. For example, it is impossible to imagine future carbon usage and the impact it could have on work patterns without knowing something about China’s likely industrial development. It is impossible to understand potential future consumption patterns without knowing something about the savings preferences of the average US worker.
So, for both these reasons, my mission is to create a global perspective. However, I am acutely aware that as I have developed the 32 pieces that follow there are many missing regions. The challenge is that if I wrote a sentence or two for every region, then what follows would become more like an encyclopaedia and lose the flow I believe to be crucial to a story that’s worth reading. So, generally I have assumed a global vantage point, and focused on specific regions when I believe something particularly interesting is happening there.
Looking back to a historical focus
It is slightly odd in a book about the future to be often casting a glimpse back to the past. Of course there are books that are resolutely future focused. However, I believe that if we want to increase our ability to understand the future of work we also have to glimpse back to the past. Taking a historical perspective can be useful in both creating a sense of momentum and velocity, and also providing a view of historical precedence. This is important for, as we have seen, there are clues to the future of work in both the first Industrial Revolution of the 1870s and indeed in the changes in production that occurred around the 1930s. It also seems to me that knowing a little about the past can serve to bring deeper insight into the future. This is particularly the case when we come to think about societal trends, including family structures and consumerism.
Understanding the broad context
Over the following 32 pieces you will see that I range far from the confined space of work itself. We will take a look at how we have lived and might live in the future, our family structures, our modes of consumption, oil prices and institutional trust. I have chosen to take this broad brush because it is clear to me that work cannot be seen without acknowledging the broader context. Work takes place in the context of families, expectations and hopes; it takes place within the context of the community and in the context of economic and political structures.
As I put these pieces together I am reminded again of my mother’s quilt-making. Over the years she collected scraps of material from many sources and then one day would sit down and work out a pattern from the pieces. I have to admit that one of the reasons the earlier metaphor of my mother’s fabrics and the quilts appeals to me so much is that, although I am not a maker of quilts, I am a collector of fabrics. Almost any trip I go on, I come back with tiny snippets of embroidery from Seoul or swathes of silk from Mumbai, or woven grasses from Tanzania. I even have a small woven Aboriginal basket made from pine needles. I’ve always patched together information in the same way. I like to travel and talk to people, and every year I make a point of visiting Asia, Africa and America.
Being a business professor is a huge advantage in this endeavour since I’m not trying to sell my ideas as I might in consulting, and I am not hiding my views as I might if I was an executive in a multinational company. I find that people tend to talk with me openly, sharing their hopes and confiding their fears. And, of course,